


Skeleton Key

by cookinguptales



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Additional Treat, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 04:01:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8431135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookinguptales/pseuds/cookinguptales
Summary: Stan's learned his lesson. No more open doors, and no more keys.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anticyclone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/gifts).



> Written for anti_cyclone, who wanted a story about Grunkle Stan locking away Ford's room.

Stanley had slept in a lot of places over the course of his life. He'd slept on couches and in cars and movie theaters and abandoned diners and--well, look, the point was, when you have a long and storied life, you sleep in a lot of weird places. He'd even slept in the woods a few times. Those nights had been strangely comfortable; dirt wasn't soft and rocks had this special talent for wedging themselves between the knobs of his spine, but the air had been clear and the stars had been bright and the soft sounds of a forest slumbering had been all around him.

The forest in Gravity Falls, though? Those trees weren't like that. The leaves didn't rustle as he walked. They whispered. He could feel dozens of eyes on his back, hundreds, as he wandered the trees that surrounded Ford's old cabin. Whenever he tried to sleep nowadays, he could see that blinding blue light painted against the back of his eyelids, and the way that Ford had vanished into nothingness inside it. He'd heard those whispers then. He knew now that unexplainable things existed in this world. They existed in Ford's woods.

Were they monsters? Were they demons? Stan learned not to look very closely. He reserved his observant eye for customers and rubes, not for the whispering pines of Gravity Falls. He ignored the scurrying in the bushes as he installed a towering totem pole, and he pretended not to see all that movement at the corner of his eye every time he had to fix that goddamn sign. Nothing good would come of acknowledging the eyes that watched him, and only sorrow could come from looking back. Ford had looked and looked and looked, and see where that had gotten him?

Perhaps it was ghosts living in those woods, their invisible forms outlined by the gaps between branches. There certainly seemed to be enough ghosts in Ford's cabin. Footprints in the basement. Scrawled notes in the bathroom. A pair of old glasses in the space where Ford had slept. They haunted Stan like a punishment and promise, and like the coward he was, he turned his eyes away from them.

It got easier over time. He got used to tuning out the whispers. He learned to look straight forward at all times instead of slantwise like he'd had to to get through life up to that point. He learned to fix his eyes on one distant point, on one friendly face in the crowd, and to ignore the eyes burning like coals behind their shoulders.

He slowly but surely exorcised the ghosts in Ford's house. He put down new carpets and threw every last scrap of Ford's bold handwriting into the basement that had come to hold his shame, and his obsession. He stood there in Ford's old room, clearing his throat around emotions he was too scared to put words to, and then walked out. He locked the door behind him and threw away the key.

He threw away a lot of keys back then. The only ones he cared about now were the ones that could unlock the mystery of what had happened to his brother, his twin, his other half. His greatest regret. Everything else, his hopes and his memories and any chance of a new start, all that was immaterial to his new goal.

Stan had no time for monsters and mysteries and ghosts. He had a portal to open and a precious, genius _idiot_ to save.


End file.
